What Is the Story About?
Frankenstein follows Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant but emotionally fractured scientist who becomes obsessed with conquering death after losing his mother. Haunted by grief and driven by ego, Victor teams up with an arms dealer, Harlander (Christoph Waltz), to pursue a forbidden experiment, stitching together body parts from corpses and attempting to create life.
On a storm-soaked night, his experiment succeeds. A living being, the Creature, opens his eyes. Instead of awe, Victor feels disgust. Terrified by what he has created, he abandons the Creature, much like he felt abandoned by his own father.
The Creature, confused and unwanted, begins to search for meaning, identity, and the simple comfort of belonging. The story becomes a tragic chase between creator and creation, a cycle of guilt, rejection, and revenge, forcing both men to confront the consequences of their choices.
At its core, Frankenstein is not just about a monster being created. It’s about what happens to something, or someone, when no one chooses to love them.
Performances?
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is powered almost entirely by its performances, and they are monumental.
Jacob Elordi is the soul of the film.
Despite layers of prosthetics, he performs with a raw fragility. His Creature isn’t a snarling monster, he’s a wounded child trapped in a stitched-together body. His halting speech, unsure footsteps, and desperate attempts to understand the world make him painfully human. Every time he looks at Victor with hope and confusion, it breaks you. This is a career-defining performance.
Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein like a man diseased with ambition. He begins as a genius with swagger and charisma, but as guilt consumes him, Isaac lets the performance unravel, voice cracking, body weakening, pride collapsing. He doesn’t play Victor as a tragic hero; he plays him as a man who refuses to take responsibility for the pain he caused.
Mia Goth is a quiet scene-stealer. Her Elizabeth has agency, she’s not the passive love interest from older adaptations. There’s a sharpness in her gaze, an unsettling intelligence beneath her softness. Her scenes with Elordi are especially striking, because she treats the Creature not as an object but as a being.
And Christoph Waltz is deliciously sinister as Harlander, charming, polite, and terrifying without raising his voice once.
Everyone is perfectly cast. But Elordi and Isaac are on a different level, one playing a creation desperate to be loved, the other a creator desperate to run from responsibility.
This is acting driven by emotion, not spectacle.
Analysis
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is not a horror film pretending to be emotional, it’s an emotional film disguised as horror.
Del Toro takes a story we think we know and flips the emotional center away from the creator and toward the creation. Most adaptations treat the Creature as a threat, a cautionary figure. Here, he is the protagonist, the one we feel for, the one we root for, the one who forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: monsters aren’t born, they’re abandoned.
The film’s emotional power comes from perspective. We first watch Victor Frankenstein tell his version of events, grand, poetic, self-victimizing. But when the Creature finally speaks, everything fractures. His version isn’t full of ego or ambition; it’s full of longing. He never asked to exist. He never asked to feel pain. And yet the world punishes him for simply being here.
This shift is where del Toro’s genius shines.
He treats the Creature like a metaphor for every person who has ever felt unwanted, a child neglected by a parent, a misfit judged for how they look, anyone who has been made to believe they must earn love.
The analysis of Victor is equally ruthless.
He isn’t a tragic genius; he’s a coward. A man who builds life without thinking about the responsibility of caring for it. Victor’s flaw isn’t moral ambiguity, it’s selfishness. Oscar Isaac makes him dangerous not because he’s violent, but because he refuses accountability.
Visually, the film is a cathedral of pain, romantic, gothic, overwhelming. Every frame looks like a painting. The contrast between warm reds and cold blues externalizes Victor’s emotional decay and the Creature’s silent yearning. The movie is drenched in symbolism, red for memory, blue for regret, black for inevitability.
But here’s where the film falters:
For all the visual splendor, the narrative sometimes stretches itself thin. Del Toro wants to explore everything, parenthood, grief, religion, existentialism, romantic tragedy, and not all threads land with equal weight. Some scenes linger longer than needed, and the pacing dips in the midsection.
Still, even when the storytelling wobbles, the emotional authenticity stays intact.
This is not a monster film. It’s a film about emotional negligence. A creator runs from his creation, and a creation spends the entire movie asking the same question children ask their parents:
Why wasn’t I enough for you to stay?
That is del Toro’s real horror, not blood, not stitched flesh… but the ache of abandonment.
Music and Other Departments?
Dan Romer’s score is not loud, not monstrous, not manipulative, it aches.
Instead of horror stings or gothic bombast, the music almost behaves like an inner monologue for the Creature. Violins quiver not in suspense but in vulnerability. The piano themes appear at moments when the Creature tries to understand the world, functioning less as background score and more as an emotional heartbeat. Silence is used just as powerfully, del Toro knows that sometimes the absence of sound is louder than an orchestra.
Visually, the film is a tour de force. The production design turns every location into a living, breathing nightmare, from the icy Arctic void to the grimy, corpse-littered battlefields. The cinematography uses a contrasting palette: red becomes memory and longing, while blue becomes regret and isolation. Del Toro frames grief like a painting, symmetrical, composed, devastating.
Costume and makeup work deserve their own applause. Jacob Elordi’s prosthetics are horrifying yet strangely delicate, proof that a monster can be beautiful without losing his scars.
This is craftsmanship with feeling.
Highlights?
Jacob Elordi’s performance
Production design & cinematography
Perfect Melodrama
Drawbacks?
Touch if romance tones down the horror.
Oscar Isaac’s performance could have been better.
Did I Enjoy It?
Definitely…despite some minor flaws…the film is enjoyable
Will You Recommend It?
Definitely.
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